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Booze orders at restaurants decline as more people drink at home

The free wine-tastings at Wine and Beyond in Edmonton always draw a crowd. Full service restaurants, however, are seeing declines in the volume of alcoholic beverages served, according to a new market analysis by The NPD Group. Photo: Misty Harris/Postmedia News

Scott Paterson loves beer. Homer Simpson, in fact, looks like a dilettante next to the Ottawa man, who helms a beer blog, dedicates his Instagram to beer photos, and hits the stores every weekend to find out which beers are new to shelves.

But ask how often the 48-year-old buys a brew at a restaurant or bar and you may be surprised at his answer: maybe twice a month in the summer, and strictly on special occasions during the winter. Between the cost, poor selection and not wanting to drink and drive, Paterson said it just makes more sense to imbibe at home.

And according to the latest market data, he’s hardly alone.

The NPD Group reports this week that Canadians are ordering less booze when dining out, which has resulted in a three per cent decline in total alcoholic beverages served during the past year. Importantly, this trend is in contrast to a three per cent increase in customer traffic during the dinner rush – when bar tabs tend to spike – over that same period.

“The volume of alcohol-related servings in Canada’s restaurant channel continues to decline,” said Robert Carter, The NPD Group’s executive director of food service.

“There’s definitely a social aspect, with the emphasis on drinking and driving and tighter liquor laws… We also know that the way Millennials look at drinking is different than in generations past. There’s more of a social stigma attached to it.”

The after-work bar scene may be waning, according to market researchers

It’s hard to tease out definitive explanations. But the six per cent decrease of snacking during “happy hour” at mid-scale restaurants offers a big clue: coupled with the decline in booze purchases, Carter concludes that the big picture is one of the after-work bar scene losing social importance.

That is, people are still buying booze; they’re just not consuming it in the same settings.

Statistics Canada’s most recent findings show that the volume of alcoholic beverages sold at beer and liquor stores in the year ending March 31, 2012, increased by 2.1 per cent – to 233 million litres – over the previous year, while wine sales in particular saw volume growth of 3.8 per cent, to reach 488 million litres. Similarly, in both the U.S. and Britain, such diverse market researchers as Mintel, Ipsos Reid, CGA-Peach Consumer Index and the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics have all separately concluded that imbibing at home has emerged as a key industry trend.

“Across all generations, retail sales of alcoholic beverages have benefited from consumer embrace of at-home drinking, which has become a habit following its emergence during the recession,” said Jenny Zegler, beverage analyst for Mintel.

As for beer blogger Paterson, who works in information technology, his out-of-home consumption is limited to twice-monthly visits to Boston Pizza to tip back drinks with colleagues. And even that ritual is tenuous.

“In the winter, we only tend to go when it’s someone’s birthday,” said Paterson. “If it wasn’t as close to work as it is – a five-minute walk – we probably wouldn’t go anywhere.”

Methodology note: Every day, The NPD Group asks more than 900 consumers about their food-service behaviour the previous day, which is collected via online surveys from a panel of 100,000 Canadians. This data, which provided the basis for the market researcher’s report, represents the total Canadian population and is demographically & geographically balanced.

Misty Harris is a nationally recognized journalist known for her stories on social science, consumer trends, demographics, academic studies, and marketing. For more than a decade, her articles have been... read more featured on the front pages of Canada’s top newspapers, including the National Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times-Colonist, Montreal Gazette, The Province, The Leader-Post, The Star-Phoenix, The Windsor Star, and Ottawa Citizen, in addition to such online news hubs as Canada.com.
Harris has been honoured by the Society for Features Journalism; appeared as a pop culture commentator on CTV, Global News and BBC World Service; reported on fashion, health and lifestyle issues for Flare magazine; and spoken as a guest lecturer at universities in Canada and the U.S.
She is a collector of hot sauces and disappointments.View author's profile